Seems interesting but unfortunately might be a bit political?
> It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.
Complaining about DEI is a marker for a specific ideology. I see this and think great, a project of people who want to be allowed to "just crack jokes" but then get super defensive when they get called out on it.
It also makes me instantly suspect that their ejection from the project from which they forked had more to do with how they composed themselves rather than the fact that they were considering a fork.
If the dev was hoping to keep their project "apolitical," they should probably leave out the two paragraphs of politics...
I don't think it's unfortunate, I think it's inevitable. The wayland vs x11 debate always had undertones of tradition, self-determination, and collectivism. Nobody without a fringe anti-"woke" mindset would create somehing like this.
(Woah there buddy, I see that finger hovering - before downvoting, read it 2x more times and see if I'm actually agreeing with you)
I think it is good that they are free from DEI, as long as they are not racist instead (and the next paragraph after the one mentioning DEI says they are not racist, so that is good). Avoiding one does not mean you need to have the other one, even though some people seem to think that it does.
> If the dev was hoping to keep their project "apolitical," they should probably leave out the two paragraphs of politics...
That might have been a good idea, to avoid mentioning such things if they are unnecessary to do so, but now it is done. It can be changed (and maybe it should be changed), but I do not really care much if they change it or not.
I build my own distro, I build myself xorg (but I am writting my own wayland compositor in order to move away from x11), I was the witness of all their tantrums breaking things all over xorg.
I did appreciate a lot the revert of all their code.
If it matters, many of their issues were apparently closed without comment. Here is an issue asking to resolve this. It also lists many of the commits.
> From a technical perspective, as someone who had previously been merging the MR's from that author, there are also a number of technical reasons we'd slowed down on merging them and started rejecting more of the MR's - most notably it becoming increasingly obvious that the MR's were untested and breaking things. Many of the MR's already have technical objections in them to the changes, and many have no benefit other than refactoring the code to make it easier for future changes he had planned, but now will not contribute to us, so would cause code churn and risk for no remaining reason.
I feel like the ship has sailed for X11 or any fork of it, regardless of its technical merits (or the lack thereof). All the major DEs (KDE, Gnome, COSMIC) are either already wayland exclusive or soon will be. New DEs like niri, hyprland, sway, etc. are all wayland only from the start (some like niri dont even have xwayland support, instead pointing users to an external project, xwayland satellite, for running X11 apps).
And for almost all the somewhat famous traditional X11 DEs or tiling managers or wms, there is now a wayland compositor mimicking them. Cinnamon and XFCE both have advanced wayland sessions (a recent review of LMDE 7 by distrowatch praised Cinnamon's wayland session as even better than KDE's wayland). They might support X11 for now but it will be increasingly harder to maintain both especially if the majority of their users use the wayland session. This will lead to bit-rotting of the X11 code paths both here and upstream (GTK, mutter, etc).
There are obviously people unhappy with wayland because it has issues with accessibility or automation or other more niche use cases. As hard as it may be, I think the time would be better spent solving these issues in wayland instead. If it cant be solved upstream, downstream protocols like the wlr-protocols can be an option. In fact, even upstream, ext-namespace protocols only require 2 ACKs which shouldn't be too hard to get especially once more wayland compositors join upstream development.
This starts to impact the entire stack as toolkits, mesa drivers, etc. are increasingly developed with Wayland in mind and are simply better tested there. IMO wayback is probably a more fruitful investment than an x11 fork for those who want to run traditional X11 DEs.
I'm conflicted. On one hand, I hate this guys politics (despite agreeing that projects should be based on merit) and from what I've heard of Xlibre I'm not super impressed by the code quality. On the other, I think X11 deserves to stick around as it is an objectively superior display technology that has been used since the 80s for a reason, despite its issues. Yes, the security is terrible by default. I also somewhat agree with killing x.org as from what I've heard the codebase is a mess. If I had all the time (and money) in the world I would either make my own X11 server unencumbered by freedesktop.org or make a display technology that fixes the problems of X11 and Wayland by fixing the security model, not being designed by committee, and being free of Waylands Linux-isms
17 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 42.4 ms ] thread> It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.
Complaining about DEI is a marker for a specific ideology. I see this and think great, a project of people who want to be allowed to "just crack jokes" but then get super defensive when they get called out on it.
It also makes me instantly suspect that their ejection from the project from which they forked had more to do with how they composed themselves rather than the fact that they were considering a fork.
If the dev was hoping to keep their project "apolitical," they should probably leave out the two paragraphs of politics...
(Woah there buddy, I see that finger hovering - before downvoting, read it 2x more times and see if I'm actually agreeing with you)
> If the dev was hoping to keep their project "apolitical," they should probably leave out the two paragraphs of politics...
That might have been a good idea, to avoid mentioning such things if they are unnecessary to do so, but now it is done. It can be changed (and maybe it should be changed), but I do not really care much if they change it or not.
I did appreciate a lot the revert of all their code.
But isn't the problem of X a problem of responsabilities breadth ? I.e. a philosophical problem rather than a "implementation" one ?
(For my part I haven't switched to wayland yet, and still use BSPWM)
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/182...
> From a technical perspective, as someone who had previously been merging the MR's from that author, there are also a number of technical reasons we'd slowed down on merging them and started rejecting more of the MR's - most notably it becoming increasingly obvious that the MR's were untested and breaking things. Many of the MR's already have technical objections in them to the changes, and many have no benefit other than refactoring the code to make it easier for future changes he had planned, but now will not contribute to us, so would cause code churn and risk for no remaining reason.
And for almost all the somewhat famous traditional X11 DEs or tiling managers or wms, there is now a wayland compositor mimicking them. Cinnamon and XFCE both have advanced wayland sessions (a recent review of LMDE 7 by distrowatch praised Cinnamon's wayland session as even better than KDE's wayland). They might support X11 for now but it will be increasingly harder to maintain both especially if the majority of their users use the wayland session. This will lead to bit-rotting of the X11 code paths both here and upstream (GTK, mutter, etc).
There are obviously people unhappy with wayland because it has issues with accessibility or automation or other more niche use cases. As hard as it may be, I think the time would be better spent solving these issues in wayland instead. If it cant be solved upstream, downstream protocols like the wlr-protocols can be an option. In fact, even upstream, ext-namespace protocols only require 2 ACKs which shouldn't be too hard to get especially once more wayland compositors join upstream development.
This starts to impact the entire stack as toolkits, mesa drivers, etc. are increasingly developed with Wayland in mind and are simply better tested there. IMO wayback is probably a more fruitful investment than an x11 fork for those who want to run traditional X11 DEs.